


Penitence

by Anythingtoasted



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Gen, Season/Series 08
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-05-13
Updated: 2013-05-13
Packaged: 2017-12-11 18:28:00
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,300
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/801796
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Anythingtoasted/pseuds/Anythingtoasted
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>a castiel drabble, from a very old prompt.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Penitence

From the moment his wife left the room, he knew he was dying.

She said nothing about it; touched his hand, kissed his cheek, made gentle fun of him, swathed as he was in the white starched sheets of his own tiny bed, the one they’d made up for him in the ward. But her smile was different, her hands less sure when she touched him, and when she went to the door she stopped, and looked back at him, like someone was filming her and she was trying to express with her body what the script did not call for with words. Regret. Contrition.

He lay back against the pillow and thought about it; about death.

He wasn’t angry. Not as angry as he expected to be, at least; he thought of his job, of how they would make money now, his wife and their daughters, with their father gone. He supposed their eldest – that beautiful, _young_ girl that had somehow come from the two of them – would grow into one of those hard, strong women who had experienced hardship. He supposed she would bend to support her mother in her loss, spread out like a tree, like a trellis, for her mother’s grief to grow against.

He didn’t want it for her; wanted her to grow soft, like her sisters; spoilt, maybe. In that moment he wanted nothing more than for her to grow shallow, vapid; grow as someone who couldn’t know the value of kindness, for they had never experienced anything _but._ He wanted her mother to teach her vanity, not how to survive; he wanted her sisters to grow into a gaggle of clutching hands, begging _Daddy will you buy me,_ not _Daddy please come back._

He swallowed and stared at the bare ceiling, and clutched the sheets; pulled them up to his chest.

He imagined the long months after his death; how it would get easier, but never _easy._ How his wife, the woman he’d met at _seventeen,_ would eventually find someone else, after months bent over their kitchen table, twisting the ring in her hands.

Perhaps she’d have to sell it.

He hoped, for her sake, that she could.

He could not accept it, this death. For himself, it meant nothing; but for his family, a family never really lucky in the first place except in love, it would mean devastation. Ruin.

It would ruin them, and he wanted to ruin God for the sake of it.

\---

She left her husband’s room and twisted the ring around her finger. She wondered if, after all this time, it would even come off.

Her flesh had grown around it – she’d gotten fatter, older, and her hands were somehow bigger, but the gold band had persisted.

When she was pregnant with their girls – with all three of them – she wondered if her swelling hands and feet would pop it off; but they did not. It was resilient, this thing, and would outlast them; the marriage, their lives, their deaths. Perhaps she’d pass it, hand to hand, to her daughters. Selfishly, though, she wanted to be buried with it. Keep it safe. She knew how these things, these small things, were easily lost.

She twisted the band around her knuckle and felt tears gather in the corners of her eyes; felt her throat swell, tight and bothersome, like she was a teenager again.

Worrying at it, like this; helped by sweat and maybe by how her pre-emptive guilt had made her _cold;_ the ring swirled around her finger and came off into her other hand. She swallowed in surprise.

She pushed it back on, looser now, and tried to ignore what had happened; tried not to ascribe to it anything more than was necessary. Husbands die, children die, mothers and fathers move on, are separated. She knows, in some distant, deep part of her, that this is just the way of things; there was a bus crash in Ottawa the other day, and fifteen children died. Just the month before, a shooting in Colorado left three strangers lying prone on the ground; she’d seen it on the news. The world is an unfair place.

By comparison, her grief was so _small;_ and yet it swallowed her. And yet, it seemed intolerable.

She left the hospital hallway, her feet treading quick, shaky steps, as if stepping on balloons; going down stairs she felt as if she would slip, felt as if her legs couldn’t carry her. She walked faster, away from the bedroom where her husband lay, as if her distance – as if not seeing it – could somehow stop it from happening.

She stopped in one of the tiny, rusting gardens dotted around the hospital, and screamed her rage and frustration into her balled up fist. She would not cry; she refused to; but she bit down on her own skin instead, drawing blood, leaving teeth-marks that her husband would later see.

She wanted to fly out of her body; explode, become nothing. She didn’t want to replace her husband with herself, but nor did she want this _process;_ the loss, the guilt, the frustration. She didn’t want to learn to cope, she didn’t want to _feel_ it, grief like a blanket over her life, grief swaddling the smiles of strangers. She didn’t want to be a widow; she was _young._

She turned to the side and was embarrassed, blood cascading away from her face, to see a man standing in the garden with her. His hands were raised; placatory. She flinched.

“Are you alright?” he asked her, and she let her hand drop from her mouth. She clenched it at her side, and the indents of her teeth stung.

She said nothing. She didn’t know the answer. He came close to her. She stepped away.

His hair was dark; he was younger than her, not unhandsome, though she was surprised to find herself even noticing if he was attractive or not. Around his shoulders was a coat, old fashioned, something her dad might have worn, when she was young. She didn’t know him, but she didn’t move away when he enfolded her in his arms.

“I’m so sorry.” He muttered into her hair, and she sobbed, and she was angry.

“What do you know?” she said, and fought the urge to kick this warm stranger, whose tie rasped against the wool of her sweater. Her fists shook, at her sides. “What the fuck do you know about sorry?” She spat. He held her tightly; he drew away.

Her chest tightened, breathing fast. She thought – but she’d never been a believer, never, it never helped - She looked at him, and he nodded gently at her, and touched her shoulder as he swept past her; into the hospital, away.

Her teeth throbbed in her gums. Her hands hurt from the strain of keeping them clenched.

\---

It was a miracle, they told her later, after the exhaustive tests. One moment he was inches from death, the next he was healing; he ate again. He laughed, and his throat no longer made that hollow, sick sound.

They let her daughters in the room. They helped him home.

In their kitchen, the first night he came home, he kissed her shoulder; wound his arms around her, held her tight. In forty years, there wasn’t really any need for him to say anything; she knew what he meant. She laughed.

Later, she told him about the man, the stranger who had hugged her; how rude he was to presume, she framed it, but her heart skipped gently at the thought of him.

Her husband laughed, joked, _maybe it was a ghost, maybe an angel,_ but she just shook her head.

She curled her hand over his fingers, and her ring clinked against his own.

 


End file.
